Condensation of Zeotropic Mixtures in Horizontal Tubes: New Simplified Heat Transfer Model Based on Flow Regimes

The need for optimal design of heat exchangers with in-tube condensation of zeotropic refrigerant mixtures has pushed the research of predictive methods in the last years. Some procedures have been developed, based on the Colburn and Drew (1937, Trans. AIChemE 33, pp. 197–215) analysis, that require significant numerical effort and the diffusivity properties of the mixture to calculate the mass transfer resistance in the process and, hence, are rarely used for heat exchanger design. Proposing a modified version of the well-known simplified approach of Silver (1947, Trans. Inst. Chem. Eng. 25, pp. 30–42) and Bell and Ghaly (1973, AIChE Symp. Ser. 69, pp. 72–79) to include the effects of interfacial roughness and nonequilibrium effects, the present study extends the flow-pattern-based model of Thome, El Hajal, and Cavallini (2003, Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer 46, pp. 3365–3387) for condensation of pure fluids and azeotropic mixtures to zeotropic mixtures. By implementing this within the above flow-pattern-based heat transfer model, it leads to an improved method for accurately predicting local mixture heat transfer coefficients, maintaining a clear relationship between flow regime and heat transfer, and achieving both the goals of higher prediction accuracy and low calculation effort. The method has been verified for refrigerant mixtures (both halogenated and hydrocarbon) having temperature glides of 3.5–22°C, that is temperature differences between the dew point and bubble point temperatures (at a fixed pressure and bulk composition).